135 research outputs found
Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles
Audio-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored, but achieving
realistic, human-like performance is still unsolved. This is due to the lack of
available 3D datasets, models, and standard evaluation metrics. To address
this, we introduce a unique 4D face dataset with about 29 minutes of 4D scans
captured at 60 fps and synchronized audio from 12 speakers. We then train a
neural network on our dataset that factors identity from facial motion. The
learned model, VOCA (Voice Operated Character Animation) takes any speech
signal as input - even speech in languages other than English - and
realistically animates a wide range of adult faces. Conditioning on subject
labels during training allows the model to learn a variety of realistic
speaking styles. VOCA also provides animator controls to alter speaking style,
identity-dependent facial shape, and pose (i.e. head, jaw, and eyeball
rotations) during animation. To our knowledge, VOCA is the only realistic 3D
facial animation model that is readily applicable to unseen subjects without
retargeting. This makes VOCA suitable for tasks like in-game video, virtual
reality avatars, or any scenario in which the speaker, speech, or language is
not known in advance. We make the dataset and model available for research
purposes at http://voca.is.tue.mpg.de.Comment: To appear in CVPR 201
DualTalker: A Cross-Modal Dual Learning Approach for Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation
In recent years, audio-driven 3D facial animation has gained significant
attention, particularly in applications such as virtual reality, gaming, and
video conferencing. However, accurately modeling the intricate and subtle
dynamics of facial expressions remains a challenge. Most existing studies
approach the facial animation task as a single regression problem, which often
fail to capture the intrinsic inter-modal relationship between speech signals
and 3D facial animation and overlook their inherent consistency. Moreover, due
to the limited availability of 3D-audio-visual datasets, approaches learning
with small-size samples have poor generalizability that decreases the
performance. To address these issues, in this study, we propose a cross-modal
dual-learning framework, termed DualTalker, aiming at improving data usage
efficiency as well as relating cross-modal dependencies. The framework is
trained jointly with the primary task (audio-driven facial animation) and its
dual task (lip reading) and shares common audio/motion encoder components. Our
joint training framework facilitates more efficient data usage by leveraging
information from both tasks and explicitly capitalizing on the complementary
relationship between facial motion and audio to improve performance.
Furthermore, we introduce an auxiliary cross-modal consistency loss to mitigate
the potential over-smoothing underlying the cross-modal complementary
representations, enhancing the mapping of subtle facial expression dynamics.
Through extensive experiments and a perceptual user study conducted on the VOCA
and BIWI datasets, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms current
state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. We have made
our code and video demonstrations available at
https://github.com/sabrina-su/iadf.git
Facial Modelling and animation trends in the new millennium : a survey
M.Sc (Computer Science)Facial modelling and animation is considered one of the most challenging areas in the animation
world. Since Parke and Waters’s (1996) comprehensive book, no major work encompassing the entire
field of facial animation has been published. This thesis covers Parke and Waters’s work, while also
providing a survey of the developments in the field since 1996. The thesis describes, analyses, and
compares (where applicable) the existing techniques and practices used to produce the facial
animation. Where applicable, the related techniques are grouped in the same chapter and described in
a chronological fashion, outlining their differences, as well as their advantages and disadvantages.
The thesis is concluded by exploratory work towards a talking head for Northern Sotho. Facial
animation and lip synchronisation of a fragment of Northern Sotho is done by using software tools
primarily designed for English.Computin
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